Chips and Salsa XX - When Iconic Meets Anechoic, Part II

10/29/2015 | 53 pages
Price: $1,595.00

In our 20th Chips and Salsa, we collaborated closely with Spirent Communications, PCTEST, and EMT Labs, to conduct arguably the industry’s most extensive independent OTA MIMO performance testing of leading smartphones – from the Apple iPhone to the ZTE Nubia. All testing took place within an ETS-Lindgren anechoic chamber. In total, we tested 15 different smartphones (3 bands per phone) that we procured from around the world, including LTE chipsets from 4 different baseband suppliers.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE STUDY INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:

Two of the top performing smartphones, the Nokia Lumia 930 and the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 are “value-priced” smartphones, indicating a disparity between price and performance.

In general, there was a large variance in the results with the top performing smartphone in a particular band outperforming most of its peers by 50% or more with moderate SNR values.

Emphasis needs to be placed on validating the RF antenna design – although the selection of the chipset supplier is important, it is only the starting point when it comes to achieving excellent RF performance.

To varying degrees, all smartphones performed poorly in at least one frequency band – two smartphones performed poorly in all three frequency bands that we tested.